Bio-Based Ideas

You may remember that a while ago I blogged about a research group that found a way to produce biogas reactor using the content of a stomachs cow . One of the questions, I had back then was what kinds of bacteria were in the cow's stomach fluids? Today, we'll look at a  massive Science article from January 28 with the title "Metagenomic Discovery of Biomass-Degrading Genes and Genomes from Cow Rumen" from the Rubin Lab with Matthias Hess and Alexander Sczyrba as the primary authors recently hit the science world, and gives us that answer.

Paint-By-Numbers Statue of Liberty In the latest Science Issue, the Venter Lab (Gibson et al. 2010) report that they have successfully created an "artificial genome" Mycoplasma mycoides which they transplanted into Mycoplasma capricolum cell to create a new Mycoplasma mycoides cell. In other words, they put the DNA of "A" into an organism of type "B". Just by doing so, they "converted" B into A. This begs the question.... So what? The dream of creating artificial life - that is to say recreate life from scratch with inanimate starting components - has been the dream of some researchers that want to get at the question of:"What is life?" Of these researchers, Craig Venter probably has been the most recognized figure. Craig Venter claims that understanding how one can create life from scratch will also give us the ability to create purpose-driven life-forms. With the current oil spill an example comes to mind where one could cr...

It has been a while since the last contribution to this site. Today’s blog entry shall be a summary of a journal article that a couple of friends and I started recently to educate ourselves on topics related to bio-based ideas that are of interest to us. Recently, I came across a general article in the Scientist that talked about biofuels production. The article mentioned integrated biofuel productionpipelines that could include the breakdown of agricultural waste products containing cellulose . Cellulose is a complex sugar, meaning that it consists of long-chains of individual simple sugar units such as glucose . The glucose that is released from the breakdown of cellulose could be used for bioethanol production. But it turns out that cellulose is a very sturdy material that is difficult and energy intensive to break down. One way to reduce the cost of break-down would be to rely on enzymes that are known as biological catalysts. Catalysts can reduce the activation energy which is ...